Health Disparities Forum

Even when medical training and education it is not directly related to health, the more education we give to our health care professional the better care they provide, so our policy will be to increase the training of medical personnel who treat patients with cognitive impairment and facilitate interaction among related social sectors.

 

Proposed policy solution

Solution 1 – Increase funding’s for training programs in Dementia, targeting doctors, psychologist, social workers and personnel involve in dementia care.

Solution 2 – Implement new programs and courses during the medical training with a focus on aging and cognitive disorders.

 Targeted policy level

Solution 1 - Ministry of Health -decide how to distribute the national health budget in terms of program training and expenses.

Solution 2 – Ministry of Educations and Medical Universities in the country– will schedule the courses, master degree programs etc. It will be also possible to present and redefine the medical training in terms of cognitive disorders.

 Potential actions

Solution 1- advocacy with to the ministry of Health to obtain funding for National and regional courses, conferences and the implementation of a Master Degree. This makes possible to develop a group of professional with training in high-quality care.

Solution 2 – Bring together the Ministry of Education and the Medical Universities to implement changes in the curriculum of Medical Sciences students. The new curriculum will include courses and modules of dementia care during training.

In a country like Cuba (LMIC) access to new funding for training and program implementation tend to be challenge, anyway there is a political concern and interest in training people and deliver free education services, this type of program will require a big budget but it will rise the diagnosis accuracy decreasing in that way the cost of late diagnosis and misdiagnosis. Bring together the Ministry of Education and the Medical Universities to redefine the program of training has been done before based on current needs, so showing this a real situation and need for our population won’t be extremely difficult.

In Cuba, health care and education are priorities and an essential principle of our system, for this reason, I think that most of the Stakeholders will be supporters of this policy.

According to the previous statement, one of the strategies to encourage the support of the stakeholders is to raise awareness around the need for better training program.